Unexpected testament

The Breman Museum chronicles Jewish strength and faith in a surprising spot: Atlanta.

December 9, 2007|BY MICHAEL SCHUMAN Special Correspondent

In Atlanta's William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, there is a life-size mock-up of the D. Haver grocery store, a Jewish-owned market that served customers in the city for many years. Kids can do their own shopping, with faux food items and toy shopping carts.

Nearby, and attached to the ceiling, is a set of rail tracks used in 1942 to transport Jews and others to Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in Poland. The building's architect, Holocaust survivor Ben Hirsch, was told during the planning stage that if the tracks were on the ceiling they would be upside down. Hirsch's response: "The world was upside down then."

To many Americans, the term "Jewish community" evokes thoughts of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. But Jews have lived in the American South since there was an American South. And one of the healthiest Jewish communities in the United States - for well over a century - has existed in Atlanta.

The experience of Southern Jewishness is placed under a microscope at the Breman. Visitors learn that Jews have been in Georgia since its founding as a British colony in 1733. The third-oldest synagogue in the United States is in the coastal Georgia city of Savannah.

Jews first came to Atlanta in 1845. Most of them had lived elsewhere in the United States. To Southern-born residents they may have seemed foreign, but the Jews who came here had already adapted to American culture and language.

They also found much opportunity here. Banned from owning land in Europe, many first worked as traveling peddlers who eventually opened retail stores. An oversized faM-gade of a retail block displayed here and dominated by Jacobs' Pharmacy ("fine chemicals, toilet articles, soap perfumery" are advertised on storefront signage) is emblematic of that era.

A relocated neon sign from "Kay's 5 & 10 cent" store accompanies a row of products manufactured or sold by Jewish-owned businesses. It's a wide range. A little, rectangular box of Scripto "no-smudge" erasers, circa 1960, is sure to elicit a smile from Baby Boomers who carried like packages in their pencil boxes when John F. Kennedy was in the White House.

Valentine's Day in Atlanta was always sweet, thanks to Jewish-owned businesses; an elaborate multihued candy box, circa 1920, decked with a Dutch canal scene, represents Norris Inc., a candy company founded here in 1910. Nearby is the blue, plastic form of a woman's chest, once used as a model display from the Lovable Brassiere Company and dating from 1950. "It costs so little to look lovable," was the business' advertising slogan.

But not all was lovable for Jews here. Two short films offer ugly stories about life as a minority in Atlanta. One relates the 1958 bombing of an Atlanta synagogue. The rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, had been a public supporter of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Four men were indicted, none convicted. In the wake of the bombing, Atlanta's non-Jewish community rallied around the local Jewish citizenry. Many Atlantans donated to the synagogue's rebuilding fund, including the local German consulate and a local girl who could afford only one dollar.

The second film, narrated by the late actor Jack Lemmon, tells the true tale of Jewish pencil factory superintendent Leo Frank, arrested in 1913 for the murder of a young female employee. Egged on by bigoted newspaper publisher Thomas E. Watson, 25 men kidnapped Frank from prison and hung him eight weeks after his death sentence was commuted to life in prison; an issue of Watson's newspaper, The Jeffersonian, dated Dec. 31, 1914, is displayed. Following a confession by Frank's former office boy in 1982, implicating a co-worker named Jim Conley, Frank was posthumously pardoned, not on the basis of his guilt or innocence but because the state failed to protect him. The Breman is planning a special exhibition on the Leo Frank case, opening in February 2008.

Relics of Jewish day-to-day life, such as displayed stained glass windows from the original downtown site of Congregation Ahavath Achim ("Brotherly Love" in Hebrew), offer testimony to Atlanta's Jewish community. (The synagogue relocated to the suburbs in 1956.) A Torah scroll, circa 1800 and salvaged from the hands of the Nazis in World War II, along with immigrants' identification cards and prayer books distributed to Jewish soldiers during World War II, are further hallmarks of Jewish existence here.